Chapter 6

How to Use Stealth, Ambiguity, and Deception to Achieve Surprise

• Conceal your intentions or coordinate your timing so that your first moves do not announce or block your later efforts.

• Announce a list of plausible courses of action and make a selection among them only after your opponent attempts to prepare for all of them; in this manner you create options for yourself while he is confused .

• Use all channels available to you when deliberately conveying selected information to influence the behavior of your rivals.

  • Perhaps the most effective channel is the media.

• Remember that a disciplined follow-through must accompany every well-intended use of information to shape the rules of the competitive encounter.

• Foster a heightened sense of security throughout the firm to protect critical corporate information from snooping competitors .

  • Ensure that employees remain tight-lipped about competitively sensitive information ”a never-ending responsibility.

  • Be wary of posting too much information on channels like the Internet that are easily accessible by your competitors.

  • Be extremely disciplined when releasing information to the media.

• Plan operations to convey selected information and indicators to rivals to influence their perceptions, emotions, motives, objective reasoning, and, ultimately, their behavior.

• Create your own IO cell to create ambiguity or deception for rivals, thereby impairing their decision-making ability.

• Does surprise have its own section in your OpOrd?